Too much money makes you blind. I worked there in the early 80s and we tried to get them to port their software to the IBM PC. They wouldn't do it because they were taking in cash selling development systems... which promptly became obsolete as the PC became popular.
This is spot-on analysis. I also believe we often neglect or dismiss these as naysayers.
Too often the media-pushed culture is blinding out those calling out what’s going on inside these cos. We need something like elevating “whistleblowers” who are willing to call these issues out
I remember being at presentations from senior people from Acorn, before they spun out ARM as a separate company, boasting that their new ARM processors had the "best MIPS per milliwatt" of any processor available from anyone.
Prof. Further later worked on processor designs using asynchronous logic. More gates needed but with most NOT changing state unnecessarily an even smaller power draw overall.
His 2004 talk “Things CPU Architects Need To Think About” was brilliant and also shone a light (if you integrate networking on the cpu, what’s the network chip division’s purpose? FDIV bug was double stupid as redesign saved no chip space).
I'd left Intel in 1996 and returned in 2000. I did notice a significant cultural shift in that time. Intel was drunk with money and less discipline. Much less a culture of challenging assumptions from all angles.
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Too often the media-pushed culture is blinding out those calling out what’s going on inside these cos. We need something like elevating “whistleblowers” who are willing to call these issues out
The rest is history.
(No power at Vcc, parasitic draw from a bus was enough!)
More favourable EMC too, tho turned out to be a bit of a dead end. The demo (play a tune and heat/cool the chip and it gets faster/slower) was fun.
Wish I could find a copy, links have all rotted.